SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

11101

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Superunknown said:
Really stuck with this one. Need some advice please, if possible.

We've booked Eurostar tickets to see my wife's family in Belgium. She's from there originally, and the last time she saw her family was in August when they came over for our wedding. We've had our tickets booked for weeks and have got all the required documentation, ordered/obtained all of the tests that we need. It's been a faff and pretty expensive.

With the recent news from the last few days, suddenly all of our plans are up in the air, despite there being no "official" confirmation of anything just yet. There's talk of a lockdown before Christmas, after Christmas, "just" restrictions, etc. The trouble is that we leave on Tuesday (21st) and come back on Thursday (30th). To me, there's a real possibility of having to quarantine when we get back, especially if restrictions come back into place. I'm a teacher, so I would most likely then have to miss the first week at least, possibly even most of the second if we have to quarantine.

We're edging towards the cautious route of cancelling the trip...but I really don't know what to do. I feel that we won't hear anything until it's too late. E.g. we might only hear of restrictions in the UK when we are already in Belgium, so may then be affected coming back. Is it likely that (given the way things are going) that we'd have to quarantine coming back? Are we perhaps being too overly negative or are we on the right track with our thinking? We're generally quite cautious/"careful" people, or at least I'd like to think so. The last 72 hours have really thrown us.

Fecking Omicron.
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The government is already reducing border restrictions and Sajid Javid admitted the other day Omicron is everywhere so no longer any point trying to keep it out.

I think there is a very small chance of you having to quarantine on your return. I think your bigger risk is not being allowed in to Belgium, but there's only another couple of days left to find out about that.
 

Shakesy

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My Omicron Diary: Day 1 (virus starting to propagate. Note - I haven't been tested)

No fever. Slight cough. No fatigue. No muscle aches. No loss of taste or smell. Feeling fine.
 

Rado_N

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Shakesey said:
My Omicron Diary: Day 1 (virus starting to propagate. Note - I haven't been tested)

No fever. Slight cough. No fatigue. No muscle aches. No loss of taste or smell. Feeling fine.
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You’ve not been tested but you think you have omicron?
 

Peter van der Gea

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Shakesey said:
I believe I've been exposed, yes. Because 27 unmasked and unsanitized people came to my in-law's 60th. So, I just KNOW! What I wouldn't do for love. Covid hath no fury like a woman scorned.
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They could have given you AIDS
 

Ferguson’s Hairdryer

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jojojo said:
Two problems. One is how many hospitalisations are too many? Is it when you run out of staff (because too many of them are isolating) or when you run out of beds?

The bigger one is having put a number on it, if you wait for that number (probably around 4k admissions/day) you overshoot and if cases were growing at the current rate prior to that lockdown then you potentially overshoot by around 8 times before the lockdown pulls cases and hospitalisations back down again. Massive numbers of deaths and absolute agony for everyone caught up in it.

In fact if you take the 8x seriously and the % of cases likely to turn into hospitalisations is similar to Delta, we should have locked down hard last week to keep it below 4k.

That's the trouble - you can't pick a number and wait for it. You have to try and read the trends and make the best judgements you can on what the cases per hospitalisation rate will look like.

Do you play it safe or do you gamble on people moderating their own behaviour and the virus looking milder than Delta, in particularly for boosted and previously infected people? It's not straight science, it's about mass behavioural psychology and risk assessments of unknown hazards.

As I say, if you want to play it safe - we lockdown hard now and hope enough delivery drivers are still available to keep us fed.
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I get your point. I’d say tiers for hospitalisations might have an effect. Eg they’ve been at 800-900 for 3 or so months, and as yet haven’t gone up despite the drastic rise in infections over the past month.

If we were to say if hospitalisations reach (hypothetical random number) 1300 per day then close large gatherings, restaurants, pubs etc, once they hit 1600 then lockdown. But for each restrictions to be removed hospitalisations have to go beneath a certain amount. So once it’s hit 1600, lockdown is only removed once it’s down to 800 per day, and hospitality reopens once it’s down to 600 a day.

The problem about worse case scenario modelling done by SAGE etc is that they are asked to forecast the absolute worse case scenario. This is of course good to know as long as the best and most likely cases are modelled, but the way it gets reported by the media 1) makes it look like fear mongering to the general public who don’t dig further to see why they forecast like this 2) Each time action is taken on these forecast without any signs of them having even set sail. More of the public loses trust and as we’ve seen with each lockdown compliance gets smaller.
 

Peter van der Gea

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Shakesey said:
It can be challenging at times. Like when someone tells me I might have aids or cancer. For no reason whatsoever. I love the Caf!
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There was a thing on the caf a while ago where everything was "something AIDS". Sorry dude, I thought you may have seen it.
 

choccy77

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So when do we think Boris will bait and switch us with new restrictions?

It seems crazy, that he could propose restaurant's and pubs could only serve outdoors in January / February the two coldest months of the year.
 

jojojo

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First glimmers of news from Denmark. The following comes with huge caveats - early Omicron cases in Denmark are mostly in young adults, that is mostly in the group that are less likely to be hospitalised and more likely to have short stays in hospital. Also, Denmark pick up a very high proportion of infections, more than the UK does and way more than most of Europe. So their case to hospitalisations ratio can't be used directly by other countries, but the comparison with delta does give us something to go on.

 

Pexbo

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jojojo said:
First glimmers of news from Denmark. The following comes with huge caveats - early Omicron cases in Denmark are mostly in young adults, that is mostly in the group that are less likely to be hospitalised and more likely to have short stays in hospital. Also, Denmark pick up a very high proportion of infections, more than the UK does and way more than most of Europe. So their case to hospitalisations ratio can't be used directly by other countries, but the comparison with delta does give us something to go on.

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60% less hospitalisations isn’t nearly low enough when it’s 420% more transmissible.

If we assume the hospitalisation to death ratio holds the same. Then for every 1 Delta death you could expect Omicron to kill 2.52
 

Dumbstar

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Pexbo said:
60% less hospitalisations isn’t nearly low enough when it’s 420% more transmissible.

If we assume the hospitalisation to death ratio holds the same. Then for every 1 Delta death you could expect Omicron to kill 2.52
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Agreed, and that looks an awful number stripped down. However, Delta hit an unvaccinated population so nearly everyone was fair game for death.

Whereas now a very small population can even be considered to fall into that Uefa CL pot (mainly unvaxxed and a small subset of elderly).
 

massi83

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Pexbo said:
60% less hospitalisations isn’t nearly low enough when it’s 420% more transmissible.

If we assume the hospitalisation to death ratio holds the same. Then for every 1 Delta death you could expect Omicron to kill 2.52
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Seems like you calculated 4,2×0,6=2,52 whereas 5,2×0,4=2,08 would be correct if we go by 420% and 60% and it could be calculated like that (I don’t think it can be).
 

FootballHQ

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BluesJr said:
It’s also partly because they are trying to be as lenient as possible at every turn because they fear the public backlash when in reality everything right now should be closed.
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I actually think majority of public will accept lockdown/circuit breaker for early part of Jan for 2/3 weeks. Boost the hell out of everyone in meantime given the queues and lift it when you get in 40-45m range which should be 3rd week of Jan. Trick is not to make lockdown by stealth or whatever go into March/April as then people will get really frustrate again and do their own thing.

We've lived with this annoying virus for pretty much two years now so most know what happens if you let things drift so I'd say as seen during the covid era people will be surprised by how compliant the majority are. I'd say nearly a million a day getting their boosters daily shows the desire to keep this variant at bay as much as realistically is possible.

Just booked in my appointment for NYE.
 

FootballHQ

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Dumbstar said:
Agreed, and that looks an awful number stripped down. However, Delta hit an unvaccinated population so nearly everyone was fair game for death.

Whereas now a very small population can even be considered to fall into that Uefa CL pot (mainly unvaxxed and a small subset of elderly).
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What's the actual data for elders in South Africa and Denmark? Of course Africa with lower life expectancy but there are plenty who don't just pass away by the time they get pass 40 so have they been shielded incredibly well or are figures mainly same as being exposed to Delta variant in last 12 months?
 

Ady87

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Got second jab Tuesday, kept missing it due to work. Girlfriend is 30 on 28th December, not made plans yet specifically because we are anticipating restrictions. She’s handling it well(ish).
 

FootballHQ

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Ady87 said:
Got second jab Tuesday, kept missing it due to work. Girlfriend is 30 on 28th December, not made plans yet specifically because we are anticipating restrictions. She’s handling it well(ish).
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I think they'll do all they can to keep restaurants/pubs open for next week.

Think they'll shut as soon as Boxing day is over though as having them open for new year is asking for trouble with the present situation.

Early Jan is probably the one time you can probably get away with closing hospitality settings for a bit given most people are broke from what they've have spent during Jan.
 

Pogue Mahone

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jojojo said:
First glimmers of news from Denmark. The following comes with huge caveats - early Omicron cases in Denmark are mostly in young adults, that is mostly in the group that are less likely to be hospitalised and more likely to have short stays in hospital. Also, Denmark pick up a very high proportion of infections, more than the UK does and way more than most of Europe. So their case to hospitalisations ratio can't be used directly by other countries, but the comparison with delta does give us something to go on.

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It’s all very encouragingly reminiscent of the early experience in Gauteng We see evidence of reduced severity and try not to get carried away because early cases skew young, we know there’s a lag, explosive increase in numerator falsely dilutes true severity etc etc

We now know (more or less) how things panned out in Gauteng and I’m getting more and more confident we’ll follow a similar path. Fingers crossed, obviously!
 
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